Executioners

by Phil Clarke

  In October 2004, it was reported in the inter­national press that thirteen-year-old Zhila Izadi from the north-western city of Marivan in Iran, had been condemned to death by stoning having been raped by her fifteen-year-old brother, Bakhtiar. She was found to be pregnant with his child, and her devout father, believing that her daughter had bought shame on the family, turned her in to the local authorities. Cam­paign­ing by organisations such as Amnesty Interna­tional and the International Commitee Against Stoning saw her sentence reduced from death by stoning to fifty-five lashes, matching her brother’s sentence, though she received these while she was heavily pregnant. The young woman gave birth to her child days later while in prison.

  Nigeria

  Sharia law was introduced in some areas of Northern Nigeria in 2002. The most famous case involving stoning in Nigeria is that of Amina Lawal who was found guilty under sharia law of having unlawful sex when she conceived a child out of wedlock. The case was eventually quashed at appeal when it was established that Amina was already pregnant when the law came into force. Lawal’s case became the focus of human-rights organisations all over the world. Despite the fact that Amina’s freedom was actually secured on a technicality, rather than an ideological U-turn, Lawal’s lawyer hailed the result as a victory for justice. There were some spectators at the trial who disagreed with the court’s verdict. One man who had come to hear the ruling said: ‘I would have preferred Amina to be stoned to death. She deserves it.’

  Human Sacrifice

  Today we see human sacrifice as the stuff of old-fashioned children’s picture books. The enduring image of a safari-suit-clad explorer crouched, sweating and petrified in an oversized cauldron, has come to represent an anachronisitc and bigoted western view of indigenous peoples and their customs.

  In fact, human sacrifice has been practised by people in many parts of the world. It was not reserved for ‘bloodthirsty primitives’, but formed an important part of sophisticated belief systems within many societies, including those that have evolved to form our own.

  It would not be outlandish to claim that any war motivated by religion also involves an element of human sacrifice because blood is inevitably spilled in order to strengthen a belief system or a way of life. The Crusades of the middle ages, the holocaust of World War II, the attacks of 11 September 2001 on the USA and the subsequent invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan all involved the sacrifice of human life. At least some of those who died in the wake of these terrible events believed that they would be rewarded in the afterlife, just as an Mayan slave whose heart was ripped from his body in a sacrificial ceremony believed he would bypass many phases of the Aztec purgatory and be transported directly to paradise.

  In many cases, the line between execution for the sake of punishment and execution for ritual sacrifice has become blurred. Criminals and captives were often chosen for religious sacrifice simply because they were the members of any society most easily disposed of, as were (sadly) illegitimate children and unmarried men and women. On the other hand, many victims of punishment executions died purely because of their religious beliefs and refusal to deny their faith ­– even on pain of death. The Christian martyrs come under this category.

  The following pages explore human sacrifice of various types. For the purpose of this book a human sacrifice is defined according to the motives of the executioner and the society or group that condones the killing. In a human sacrifice, the executioner is almost always a religious leader, a highly respected member of the community rather than an employee of the government or prison system. He or she occupies a completely different position in the community from one who executed his victims according to the will of a judge and jury. Instead of a life of isolation and secrecy, the life of one of these religious leaders was often one of privilege and power and although the names of many of these priests and holy men have been erased over the centuries – their many brutal acts have become legendary.

  There are three main types of human sacrifice evident in history. They are ritual, cannibalistic and retainer sacrifice.

  Ritual Human Sacrifice

  Ritual human sacrifice involves the killing of a human being in order that the victim’s body or lifeblood can be offered to a supernatural force. Most participants believing that the strength and happiness of their gods, and consequently that of the people, depend upon human bloodshed. The Meso-Americans were prolific in their ritual sacrifice of captives and commoners to their vast pantheon of gods, and it was looked upon as an integral part of their worship. The ancient Chinese and the Celts believed likewise.

  Eat Your Heart Out

  Cannibalistic human sacrifice involves killing a person in order to invoke the powers of the Gods or ancestors through the consumption of various body parts, or to punish an evil-doer. The reasons for consuming human organs are usually spiritual, but in societies where people rely on hunting for meat and do not keep livestock, human meat from sacrificial victims might form the main source of protein and animal fats for those privileged enough to receive it. The people of the Kombai who live in the jungles of Papua have been known to kill and cannibalise people they deem to be witches, or Khakhua-Kumu. They believe that these people eat the souls of their victims, and the only way to punish them properly is to kill and eat them. As the soul is perceived to dwell in the brain and in the stomach, it is these body parts which must be eaten. There are men still living within the Kombai tribe who have killed and eaten male witches.

  Taking One For The Team

  Retainer sacrifice involves killing important or useful members of the household belonging to a dead patriarch, king or nobleman in order that they might continue to serve him in the next world. This was perhaps the most widely practised form of human sacrifice – many cultures adopted the practise, includ­ing the Vikings, the Egyptians, the Romans and the Greeks. Servants, concubines, wives and employees considered it a great honour to accompany their lord and master into the afterlife, and were willing to die in order to continue serving him. Perhaps they were so willing because the alternative was often a future of slavery, extreme poverty and eventual death through malnutrition or disease.

  Propaganda?

  It is important to remember that stories of human sacrifice often come from invaders of that particular society. These people would have been keen to por­tray themselves as vastly more civilised and superior to the ‘primitive natives’ they had come to conquer. Therefore many historians are sceptical about the true role of human sacrifice within these ancient civilisations. In the years following their invasion of Britain, the Romans invested a lot of energy in accusing the Druids of incredible evil towards the Celts. Stories of enormous fires on which were thrown women and children for the appeasement of the pagan gods filtered back to Rome, in the same manner that Polish immigrants to Britain were occasionally accused of eating babies in the years following World War II. It is also worth noting that during a large-scale invasion, religious scriptures, ceremonial artefacts and other important cultural items were often wiped from the face of the earth. When the Spanish Conquistadors invaded South America they burnt as many sacred books as they could get their hands on, obliterating centuries of history because they believed them to be the work of Satan. The Romans destroyed or bastardised Pagan religious sites in order to introduce their religion of choice: Christianity. Therefore the real role played by human sacrifice within these long-dead civilisations can never be fully understood.

  Hard evidence of these practises does exist in many places. One thing is for certain; the concept of human sacrifice is certainly ancient and has its roots in reality, even if the actual occurrences were in fact more rare than we’ve previously been led to believe.

  Ritual Human Sacrifice

  The earliest evidence of ritual human sacrifice dates from at least 5,000 years ago. Early Danish farmers sacrificed tools, food and human body parts, placing them in pots before throwing them into bogs.

  The first recorded case of ritual sacrifice o
ccurred at Sigerdal, near Copenhagen around 3500 bc. The bodies of two young girls were found there, one of whom still had a chord wrapped around her neck. The motive behind this sacrifice was probably to ensure the health of precious crops during the growing season.

  There is an enduring belief that in order to get something from the gods, one must first offer them something. The life of a human being is generally counted among the most valuable gifts one can give. This is an idea that permeates almost every religion on Earth, including major religions such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

  The Binding of Isaac

  All three abrahmic religions (Christianity, Judaism and Islam) feature the story of the binding of Isaac. According to this story God (also called Yanweh or Allah, depending on the chosen version) ordered Abraham to slaughter his favourite son Isaac in the land of Moriah. Abraham and Isaac travelled for three days until they came to a hill. Their servant remained at the foot of the hill while Abraham and Isaac proceeded alone, Isaac carrying the wood upon which he was due to be sacrificed. During the journey Isaac repeatedly asked Abraham where the animal for the burnt offering was. Abraham then replied (somewhat ominously) that God would provide one. Just as Abraham was about to kill Isaac, he was stopped by an angel and given a ram which he sacrificed in place of his precious son. Thus it is said, ‘On the mountain the Lord provides’ (Genesis 22). As a reward for his obedience he received a promise of numerous seed and abundant prosperity. Many followers of the abrahmic religions consider it important that God stayed the hand of Abraham and did not actually require him to go ahead with Issac’s murder. For believers, this proves that theirs is a merciful and gentle God who does not harm his followers unecessarily. However, the very fact that Abraham of the story was not utterly dumbfounded by God’s demand for blood demonstrates that it was once a commonly held belief that the sacrifice of an eldest son or virgin daughter may place you firmly in the Lord’s good books.

  Perhaps the most important human sacrifice included in the Bible is that of Jesus himself, who Christians believe gave his life to ease the debt of human sin. Many believers would not consider this a true human sacrifice because Jesus was not human as such, but rather an incarnation of God in human form. Also, his tormentors were not of the conviction that God would be appeased by the death of his only son – so they were not conciously offering up his soul to a supernatural being, merely punishing him in the same manner as they punished common criminals. Nevertheless there was certainly an exchange of sorts taking place in the eyes of Christians. According to the Bible’s teachings Jesus went to his death at the hands of the Roman authorities so that God could forgive humankind of our sins against him (See ‘Crucifixion’ on pages 18–25).

  The Christian ritual partaking of the holy commu­nion, or eucharist, is a symbolic re-enactment of this momentous exchange. During communion, Christians eat of the body and drink of the blood of Christ in exchange for God’s absolution, and as a reminder of his supreme sacrifice for our sins. This ritual could be interpreted as having roots in cannibalistic sacrifice because in consuming the body and blood of Christ, Christians expect to embibe something of his spirit.

  Of course, over the centuries many Christians, Jews and Muslims have sacrificed themselves and others in the name of religion – and some continue to do so to this day. How this differs fundamentally from the examples we are about to explore, or whether the latter-day al-Qaeda suicide bomber is really very different from a Medieval Catholic martyr or a Mayan sacrificial victim is a controversial subject more suitable for discussion in another book.

  The Celts

  There is strong evidence that ritual human sacrifice took place in ancient Celtic society. It should be pointed out that much of the surviving written evidence comes from the Roman invaders, who would have had a political agenda. Nevertheless, writers such as Strabo and Diodorus Siculus maintained that a normal Celtic sacrifice involved striking a man who had been consecrated for sacrifice in the back with a sword, and making prophecies based on his death throes. These killings would not have been carried out unless a druid (a Celtic priest) was present to officiate, though it is unclear whether the druid himself would strike the death blow. According to Strabo other methods of sacrifice involved shooting with arrows, impalement, or the burning of humans on a huge fire of wood and straw, along with livestock and various wild animals.

  It is certainly worth noting that no evidence for the Celtic use of bows and arrows has ever been found by archaeologists. The Celts were not keen archers and the Celtic words for bow and arrow were adopted from Latin and Norse, so it is likely that this was an invented rumour based in Roman political propaganda.

  The Wicker Man – Fact or Fiction?

  Julius Caesar personally accused the people of Gaul of building huge human effegies from wood, the limbs of which were filled up with living people and set alight. In Commentarii de Bello Gallico (Commentary on the Gallic Wars) written between 58 and 45 bc, he claimed that those chosen for such a fate were usually thieves and petty criminals as these pleased the gods most, but when stocks of petty criminals ran low, innocents were sacrificed in the same manner. There is more actual evidence for this method of sacrifice than for Strabo’s bow and arrow nonsense.

  The notion of a ‘wicker man’ has become an enduring part of Celtic heritage – the image of a large god-like effigy turning up in blockbuster films, poetry, folk art and scuplture as well as neopagan festivals. This symbol of Celtic heritage has been enjoying something of a resurgence for sometime now – leading many to believe that the wicker man is just a sensational invention by the Victorians to romanticise our shared past. In fact, a variation on the wicker man can be found in many places, including Irish and

  Welsh Legend.

  A story included in the second branch of the ancient Welsh book, The Mabinogi, describes an unusually cruel form of punishment whereby the victims were enclosed in an iron chamber and given an abundance of alcohol. While the victims were getting drunk, the village blacksmiths gathered to build a huge charcoal fire around the chamber, gradually heating the iron chamber until it became white-hot – slowly roasting the unfortunate inhabitants.

  Whether this method was ever actually employed is a matter for debate. One imagines that the building of an iron chamber large enough to house a human would be expensive and elaborate in the extreme, not to mention the effort involved in gathering enough local blacksmiths to build and feed the fire until it was hot enough to cook people alive! However, evidence for the existence of the Brazen Bull (see Phalaris on pages 65–69) suggests that similar contraptions were built and used by other cultures, so perhaps it is not beyond the realms of possibility.

  Teranis: God of Thunder

  The Celts worshipped three main gods and each required a different kind of sacrifice. According to ancient Celtic legend, Teranis, the god of thunder, required his sacrifical victims to be burnt alive in giant wicker cages. It is not a huge leap from giant wicker baskets to wicker ‘men’, built as a like­ness of Teranis. This seems a more likely form of punishment than the iron chamber described in The Mabinogi.

  The Lindow bogman

  The strongest evidence that the Celts were exponants of ritual human sacrifice was dicovered in 1983, when a English man named Andy Mould found the body of a man buried in Lindow bog during the first century ad. The body was so well preserved that it was possible to ascertain his last meal and the nature of his death. The Lindow bogman was struck three times on the head with a blunt object (probably an axe), strangled using a thin cord which closed the wind­pipe and broke two upper vertebrae, and had his throat cut in quick succession before being thrown into the bog. This pattern fits with the threefold method of human sacrifice often described in Celtic legend. The Celts believed, as Christians do, that the number three was a sacred number, coinciding with their three most powerful Gods, Teranis, Esus and Teutates. Teranis required his victims to be burnt to death, but sometimes a weapon like an axe made a suitable substitu
te. Esus was the god of the under­world – his sacrificial victims were usually hung from trees, stabbed to death or strangled in some manner, Teutates was the god of the tribe and required his victim to be drowned. The manner of Lindow bog-man’s death may have been planned as a sacrifice to all three gods at once. His throat was most likely cut immediately after death in order to drain the blood from his body – another sign that his death was carefully planned and executed for ritual purposes. The blood was probably collected in a vessel, whereby it was offered to the gods, or imbibed by the officiating druid.

  Unusual Findings

  During the investigation into the case of the Lindow bogman scientists made a number of other interesting discoveries. Firstly, the Lindow man had worn a beard – facial hair is almost unheard of in other bog bodies. His hair had been cut a few days before his death, his fingernails were clean and he was taller than average – 170 centimetres (5 ft 7 in). These obser­­va­tions led scientists to believe that the bogman was a privileged member of society, the clean fingernails and evidence of grooming meant he was not a labourer, and the lack of injuries (apart from those he incurred during death) meant that he was not a warrior either. The archaeologists concluded that the Lindow bogman was either an aristocrat, a druid or a king who had probably been chosen for sacrifice during the summer festival of Beltane.